By Jerry MikorendaShortly before noon on Friday, February 21, 1862, a detachment of Marines with bayonets fixed for battle marched passed the wooden gallows and took up their positions. In the streets, an angry mob milled about purchasing liquor and trinkets as if a sporting event was about to begin. Drum rolls echoed off the courtyard walls as the black shroud pulled across the prisoner’s face. The Marshal held his sword high in the air.How could it have ever come to this point for “Lucky Nat?”

In my last post, I promised to follow up on the career of Lewis Masquerier, the enigmatic National Reformer and Greenpoint resident whose name appeared at the top of an 1854 antislavery petition. A transplanted Kentuckian, Masquerier was an unlikely candidate to represent either the antislavery cause or the brand of utopian urbanism that would win him a fleeting recognition in the mid-1840s. But his eccentric career offers a fascinating glimpse into the many roots and diverse branches of mid-nineteenth century reform.

The relationship between antislavery and land reform may not seem obvious at first, but in the minds of the thousands of urban working-class residents who looked to “the Freedom of the Public Lands” as their salvation from their status as permanent wage-earners, the two reforms were inextricably linked.

King Cotton sustained a powerful connection between the antebellum South and New York City, one that expanded and intensified the demand for slavery.[1] Gotham’s well-known cotton ties, however, have long overshadowed another cross-regional bond sealed by the city's appetite for lucrative commodities: Dixie's state lotteries.

An image of NYC looking south from St. Paul steeple. Everything to the south was to be destroyed in the attack.

By Clint Johnson The six Confederate officers who tried to burn down Manhattan on Friday night, November 25, 1864, were terrible terrorists. They were not terrible in the sense that they were religious fanatics intent on killing 814,000 people. They were terrible in the sense that they were warm-hearted men who wished no one harm. They were terrible in the sense that they had no idea how to burn down the nation’s largest city. They were not terrorists, just lousy spies and saboteurs.